The brilliant set of the Opera Hong Kong’s new production of Madama Butterfly, which opened on 6 October, is a panel set a few meters back from the front of the stage that emulates the front of a Japanese house. The room itself is set into this panel almost 2 meters above the stage floor….
Diversity, even—or perhaps especially—Asian diversity, in crime novels and dramatizations is of course nothing new: Inspector Ganesh Ghote first appeared in 1964; Priyanka Chopra debuted in Quantico in 2015. But, mirroring the real world, there is now diversity within the diversity. Bloody Foreigners, Neil Humphreys’s latest “Inspector Low” novel, this time has the bipolar Singapore…
Anyone who has gone even slightly off the beaten track in Southeast Asia is likely to have come across “sea people”, which go by various names: Orang Laut, Sama Bajau, Chao Le, “Sea Gypsies”. These are the people covered in Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia From the Past to the Present, a recently-published collection of…
Written when the composer was just 12, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s La Finta Semplice qualifies as a real rarity. After a performance the year following its composition, it dropped from the repertoire and was not staged again until modern times. That Musica Viva’s recent production at Hong Kong’s City Hall was a premiere seems beyond doubt,…
This story of business in China starts, alarmingly, with a hostage-taking over a commercial dispute. But rather than launching into a tale of business noir, the author admits that, well, the hostage-taker had a point: he had not in fact been paid.
Perhaps it was being forced to skip a year that prompted Opera Hong Kong to step outside the normal commercial comfort zone and program Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi for this year’s summer semi-staged production at City Hall. Whatever the genesis of the decision, it was a fortuitous choice.
Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between…
Opium’s role in the history of East Asia has been well-documented, most notably perhaps in Julia Lovell’s definitive 2011 book The Opium War. This, and others like it, deal with the issue mostly from the perspective of the consuming countries, in particular China; Thomas Manuel’s Opium Inc. is noteworthy in focusing just as much on…
Anthony Barbieri-Low starts his book comparing ancient Egypt and early China by saying it was a somewhat off-the-wall thing to do.
“China’s new global status as a rising technology power”, as the editors of this new study put it, has increasingly engendered alarmed, if not alarmist, rhetoric by Western politicians and commentators. The combined response of Innovation and China’s Global Emergence, a new collection of academic essays that attempts a ground-up review of the issue, might…
Viewed from a perch in Hong Kong, one of the most striking things about Lion City, Jeevan Vasagar’s new book on Singapore, Hong Kong’s best frenemy, is that it includes nary a mention of Asia’s World City.
It is tempting to see Anuk Arudpragasam’s new novel A Passage North, set in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, as having political intent. It undoubtedly does: it is set around the dutiful visit of Krishan, a Tamil living in Colombo, to Sri Lanka’s war-scarred Northern Province for the funeral of Rani, his…
Vijay Gokhale retired as India’s Foreign Secretary in 2020 after nearly four decades in the diplomatic corps, specializing in China, including a posting as Indian Ambassador in Beijing, experience much in evidence in his recent thoughtful and surprisingly frank book on Sino-Indian diplomacy.
China’s increasingly dominant position in global economic and political affairs has so far not been matched by similar progress in international use of either the Chinese currency or language. This can at times seem curious to some of those charting China’s rise. Jeffrey Gil of Adelaide’s Flinders University offers The Rise of Chinese as a…
Musica Viva’s new production of Norma—Vincenzo Bellini at his bel canto best—is perhaps an omen: it is just one letter shy of “normal”.